


Tales To Be Told

by lu_oo



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:06:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28128093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lu_oo/pseuds/lu_oo
Summary: Collection of short stories, one chapter per character..
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	1. Toy Soldier

**Author's Note:**

> In which The Toy Soldier contemplates on baking.

The Toy Soldier is, arguably, fantastic at making tea. After all, it spent, however many millennia, of its existence on practising the art of brewing and inventing its own tea blends (some of which were apparently more successful than the others, at least according to what its friends have said.) Oh, and it made sure to learn everyone’s favourite tea flavours because it’s just this thoughtful! It can even brew tea for the octokittens! Granted that one has some very questionable ingredients. 

Baking, however… baking was a different kind of beast entirely. It knows very well that baked treats, especially scones and biscuits, go amazing with tea, are the tea’s best friends and to make for a perfect five o’clock break. Which is why it is so utterly aggravating that it can’t bake those at all. Toy Soldier loves its friends, it really does, but it is a bit irritating that even  _ Marius _ , of all people, is better at baking than it is. Brian’s amazing at it and he can’t even eat anything! It knows how to eat and yet... Raphaella keeps telling it that “it doesn’t make much sense on how is that even possible because there are no real organs” and that the whole phenomenon is “simply fascinating!” Truth be told, it knows exactly “how” and it makes perfect sense to it, but there are just some things that should be kept secret and it doesn’t matter how many conspiracy theories are made about its eating habits. Silly Nastya, has once tried to spread misinformation about it, that it just hides food elsewhere - so it sat right in front of her and ate its portion of the dinner (a very delicious pumpkin cream, if it recalls correctly) without breaking the eye contact with her. After all, keeping your friends well informed is for the best! 

At least over the years, it has figured, maybe, what the tricky part of baking was. It is, extremely good at following baking recipes to the tee but the recipes are… not always correct! Still, that is hardly Toy Soldier’s fault. Everything goes smoothly when there is someone around to help - well actually, that depends on who is around to help - correct the recipes mistakes. And it enjoys cooking with Brian and Marius, it even enjoys cooking with Ashes or Nastya (although that is more for the fun of it than the actual end results.) But it really wishes it could do so on its own. What if it wants to stop by some planet! What if it’s trying to make some (short-lived) mortal friends and maybe the way to their heart is going to be baking! It really didn’t want to burn someone’s house down again! At least not by accident, it’s just like Ashes says - arson is more fun when it’s planned, which in their case it probably always is. 

Apparently, the key here is to notice when the dough is missing something, adding more flour if it’s too sticky, adding more eggs when it feels too tough. In Toy Solider’s mind, the recipe should already account for that, but apparently, at least according to Brian, it has something to do with “air humidity” and “temperature.” Maybe the truth here is that tea is actually superior because it doesn’t demand any of that!

Still, it has a lot of time to learn how to spot the missing ingredients. And maybe then it can even start experimenting with them as Marius does! The key here is to never give up, and it has, famously, never gave up. Or at least it likes to think so. It happily adds “learn how to bake till the end of this century” to its mental notes (and also real, written notes) and decides to happily march towards the kitchen. 


	2. Dr Carmilla

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts on Dr Carmilla post-DTTM.

There are no stars visible within the deep space. Just an outstretching canvas of pure, impervious darkness. At times she wondered what was the point of even having windows installed in spaceships made for long term space travel when most species wouldn’t be able to see anything but vast darkness. The stars are simply too far away from each other, and the deep space between them blocks every and any fleeting light. So for the most time, there is absolutely nothing worth looking out the window for. For whatever unlogical, unjustifiable reasons, she does so anyway. 

Silvana’s not a big ship but it’s not the smallest one either. Most times it does just fine housing a crew, sometimes tends to be a little cramped, depending on how many people are on board at the time. Though, currently, she’s the only one by the piloting deck, looking through the observation window at… nothing in particular. There isn’t really much to look at in the first place. It is, however, a good place to stop and think things through. She finds she’s been doing that a lot lately, letting her mind drift. 

There are several theories regarding the significant gaps between the stars she went through, some time ago now, with her academic journal. The exact time of the discussion is tricky to pinpoint but she remembers the contents of the discussion and the essays which followed it. Well, she remembers seeing Von Raum’s drafts (one them anyway, exactly 27 pages printed pages, though some of them half-eaten by a rogue octokitten), one finished essay (that was for sure Drumbot Brian’s, stretched out and longer than necessary but still a solid read if you ignored how joyless his academic writing was) and a set of documents sent by their anonymous colleague who nicknamed himself Dr Pill (she sometimes wondered what he was up to these days.) This journal, and the essays published in it, tended not to include Raphaella as she was… banned from the most academic societies due to the nature of her studies. Still, she would help out sometimes, space being somewhat an interest for the angel. The particular theory which currently circled around her mind couldn’t be exactly credited to one person. Something about space being this vast zone in which everything steadily grew apart. According to it, every star, every planet, every atom was slowly drifting away, further from the other, leaving only silence in its place. Some sort of profound emptiness, created by the force of nature.

She thinks she’s been getting too nostalgic lately. The view out the window still isn’t much. There is nothing she can focus on and she keeps drifting off into old memories. Silly, isn’t it? When you live for this long, things just kind of blend together, the good and the bad. A soup of barely coherent memories she can dive into on a lazy, uneventful day. So maybe she can indulge herself today, maybe she can stay by the window for a little longer, looking to find some meaning in the galaxy’s twilight, searching for something deep within her memory, some traces of happier times. 


	3. Drumbot Brian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some thoughts on Brian's job as the ship's pilot.

Piloting the Aurora is different than piloting most ships. Not that Brian is an expert in flying more... standard ships, for that you would probably be better off going to Marius, but he is extremely good in providing navigation for their special home-ship. Which, arguably, is more of a navigator’s job than pilots, but it’s been a long time since he got his role on the ship and nobody is going to bother changing it now. 

Ivy is supposed to be the ship’s navigator, but she’s more interested in collecting maps rather than actually using them and also she’s supposed to be the crew’s “archivist” but Brian thinks that she’s more of a librarian. It is a wonderful library she has made over the years, both the physical one, which he visits regularly and the digital one, in form of all of the data she stores in her brain. 

So, piloting Aurora mostly boils down to convincing her to pick up a certain route, providing coordinates and occasionally helping Nastya with whatever repairs are there to be made. Which in practice, means that he spends a lot of his time just resting in the pilot cabin or just chatting with the ship. If he ever needs to press any of the flickering buttons on the multiple boards, he can always ask Aurora herself, or Nastya, or in extreme circumstances even Marius (although there was a 50/50 chance he would just sit back and enjoy the chaos just so he can “measure how Brian reacts to stress” or some other made-up, nonsensical excuse). 

Thankfully, the dire button-pressing situation did not occur in the last 6 millennia and most “piloting” days are spent in relative peace, especially since he has somehow managed to convince Jonny not to interrupt him. An extremely important job which requires a lot of concentration and focus, he told his first mate, and technically it was an okay thing to say because it secured peace for Aurora (and for him) which was, in this situation, way more important and definitely morally correct. 

It’s probably the quietest, aside from the silent buzzing of the machinery but even that he finds comforting, place on the whole ship and he likes it that way. It’s cosy, and it’s a great place for contemplation, and he enjoys panel conversations with his friend. Sometimes she even suggests the most exciting places to go to. 

Maybe one day he is going to go back to piloting usual spaceships, maybe he will even get better at it, without having to worry about crashlanding somewhere again. But for now, he is happy piloting and living on, the Aurora. 


	4. Arthur Pendragon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Arthur Pendragon wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The major depiction of violence has been added specifically for this short, also there is some "is the alien creature going to eat me" questions but like it does not happen.

Arthur Pendragon does not remember falling asleep. Yet, here he is, woken up by a stranger who is looking at them with a strange look on their face, something akin to curiosity, but a cold and distant one. Like they are looking at a puzzle and not a person.

He has seen this distant look in someone else’s eyes before, although where exactly he cannot recall. And he cannot give his clouded mind time to recall because there is a cold feeling of sharp metal on his throat. In the corner of his eye, he sees a short sliver blade, adorned with strange reflective patterns.   
He still has his gun. He can feel its weight on him, it’s just waiting patiently in the holster, just in case. The realisation makes him feel a little more confident. He just needs to figure out where he is and why.

“Good morning.” 

He needs a moment to respond, not only because of how dry his mouth feels but also because the stranger is somehow speaking in his language, and that means they also must be from Fort Galfridian, even though their clothes are nothing like he has seen anyone wear. 

Probably, the best solution here would be to get rid of the stranger and figure out why is he here and how can he get back home. So he pulls out his gun as quickly as his tired body allows him to and it’s clear that the stranger didn’t expect that because they don’t slash his throat open.   
With a loud thud, they fall on their back, and in this exact moment, he realises he shouldn’t have done that. There is a mass of thin, shimmering limbs sprouting out of the body. Maybe he missed, maybe he should try again, but he can clearly see the pool of thick red blood dripping out from their stomach. He cannot bring himself to shoot at them again. 

Especially not when they speak up.

“Please do not shot me.” He watches in pure terror as the stranger in front of him reaches out inside their bloody stomach wound with one of the slimy thin limbs and pulls the bullet shell out. And then they just sit up like none of this happened. The cut heals up as to emphasise that the last few minutes absolutely didn’t happen, and the only proof is the small hole in the stranger’s cloth. That, and the swirling mess of iridescent limbs. “The bullets are incredibly irritating and I dislike having to pluck them out.” 

They swiftly take away his gun with one of the loose limbs and toss it across the room. He doesn’t even have the strength to fight or protest. 

“Are you going to torture me now, rob me and eat me or what? I assure you, there isn’t much meat left on these old bones.” He tries to find some reasoning as to why he was suddenly woken up by a strange alien, one that didn’t account for the distant curiosity in their eyes. He would maybe prefer to be eaten than treated as an interesting novelty by this being.

“Ew, no?”

“Then… what did you pick me up? And what did you wake me up for?”

“I think if I just wanted to see if you have anything valuable on you, I wouldn’t have woken you up.” So it was the damned curiosity. “And I picked you up in the first place because it is very strange to find a life pod in a completely empty sector of space, where there are no planets around, no broken spaceships from which it could’ve come from, and the nearest sun has died off, by the looks of the nearby planetary nebula, approximately one billion of years ago.” 

They continue to babble, something about the safety of “evacuation procedures” but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because he remembers the sun. He remembers his loves dying in front of him, he remembers what Mordred, no, what his son says to him before catapulting him off the station, he remembers watching his home, his people, collapse into the sun and he knows why but it still hurts.   
It seems that his crying has abruptly stopped the stranger from blubbering about gods know what. He doesn’t even know when he started crying exactly, but his eyes and shirt are wet and he is sniffling like he hasn’t in years. 

“I’m sorry.” Is all he hears them say. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hmmm I wonder who did our dear Arthur run into : )c


	5. Raphaella la Cognizi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raphaella's first encounter with an octokitten.

“What… is this?” 

Raphealla has been on the board of the Aurora for around a week now, yet this is the very first time she has encountered… one of these creatures. She was warned by others but decided she had to do some investigating on her own and not just believe their claims.

But as much as she searched, despite the fact that the ship was supposedly infested with them, she didn’t see a single one.

Until today, that is. She is standing in the ship’s kitchen, with Ashes, one of her new crew members and right in front of her, on the counter sits… The most adorable creature she has ever seen. Raphaella does not care much for animal looks, as much as she cares about studying them but… it’s big round eyes, the cute colourful pattern on its fur, the adorable fluffy ears, the wonderful slithering tentacles… It was perfect.

“That’s an octokitten. Thought you would’ve seen one by now?”

“I have not! I thought you all made them up!” She makes a step towards the charming creature and it begins to make a strange noise. “Oh! Why is it doing that!”

“It’s hissing and if I were you I would either back out or shot the damned thing.”

She is definitely not going to do that. What she is going to do is catch it and properly… hm she does not necessarily want to cut this one open, not when it’s this cute. She is going to put it in an enclosure and observe and note its behaviours. 

“Ashes. Please help me catch it.”

“Catch it? What for?”

“I need to properly study it.” For some reason, the octokitten shivers when she says that. Silly little thing, nothing unethical is going to happen to you! At least not for one.

“I mean the best way to go around this would be to lure it with some meat and then maybe grab it with-” They make a pause and look around the kitchen. Quickly they spot a pair of cooking, heat-safe oven gloves. “Protective gear!”

“Great! Amazing! Now…” She steps away from the octokitten and opens the fridge but doesn’t look away from the creature. It’s not going anywhere. Sure enough, there is some meat in the fridge, labelled “FOR DINNER - DO NOT TOUCH” but it’s for the greater science so she takes it out anyway. 

“Will this do for a container?” Ashes shows her a relatively big empty jar. “They love to squeeze inside of these.”

“Perfect.” Raphaella takes the gloves and the jar from them and put the bits of raw meat inside. Come to think of it she has a hard time identifying what kind of meat this is. It doesn’t really matter for the octokitten though, because the second she leaves the jar alone on the kitchen table it jumps inside it. 

“Now!” She hears Ashes scream and they don’t have to repeat themself. With gloves on her hands protecting her from the creature’s teeth she manages to screw the top of the jar. 

The octokitten continues to angrily wave its tentacles around and hiss but it doesn’t help much now.

“Make sure you are holding the lid correctly, they actually know how to unscrew jars.” Ashes says.

“Got it, oh what a smart creature you are! I’m going to place it inside of a tank enclosure, does it need anything special?”

“Food. Lots and lots of food. Mostly meat” She nods and sets off to leave the kitchen and take the octokitten back to her newly set up laboratory. Behind her, she hears Ashes say “And under no circumstances... do not let it escape. They hold grudges.” 


End file.
